What You Need to Know from #SocialSA

Yesterday, Mike Wronski from Fuseware and Arthur Goldstuck from World Wide Worx introduced their findings from the soon to be released Social Media Landscape 2015 to Johannesburg’s digital community.

The actual report will be released in the coming weeks but the conference broke down the key points on how social media has been functioning in South Africa over the past year. The findings are both fascinating, as well as in line with the thinking that local digital fundis have started exploring.

So we thought we’d gather up some of our highlights for you in a nice condensed and easy to digest format.

The Social Networks doing well:

• 9 out of 10 of SA’s top brands are on both Facebook and Twitter.

• Facebook is still the most effective social network for brands, with 60% of brands stating an effective presence.

• Twitter has 7.4 million SA users, which is a 14% growth from 6.6 million users in 2014.

• Corporate blogs have seen a resurgence in popularity with viewers

• LinkedIn and Instagram are growing. LinkedIn is only now starting to be used well by SA companies.

• Instagram is the fastest growing network in SA, having seen an amazing 133% increase in growth from last year, with 2.68 million active monthly users.

Instagram is the social network brands are most looking to adopt in the next 12 months #SocialSA

The Social Network not doing well:

• Pinterest accounts have declined from 910K accounts to 840K over the past year, a 17% drop.

What can we expect to see brands doing in the next 12 months?

Big topics coming out of the conference where the value of quality content over simply using social media as an advertising medium, as well as the increased popularity of influencer marketing, with more than half of SA’s brands using online influencers. Another insight was the fact that the biggest spend in the next year is looking to go on social analytics, to enable brands to streamline processes and allow relationships to scale.

Biggest spend on social media is going towards social analytics to streamline processes and enable relationships at scale #SocialSA

There was also much discussion about how each platform should be used optimally – basically how brands’ audiences are using them, and if brands listen to their audience, then they can start creating the right content per platform to properly speak to their audiences.

@mikewronski we need to start creating tailor made content for each platform – Its vital to understand the tools 2 measure ROI #SocialSA